Page 66 of Hanging and Burning

“Tina Marie’s godmother?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Would you happen to know where Tina Marie went?”

The girl stared at me with vacant eyes.

“Answer him, Lucy,” Fracas interjected.

“Um, I don’t know, he said—”

“Who said?” Fracas challenged.

“Randy did. He said that she was hidin’ in a—a apartment or sumpin’ in Central Park. I mean, there ain’t no apartment buildin’s in the park, but that’s what he said.”

My time on the NYPD was valuable for later private detective work, even if it was ultimately disheartening when it came to the institution itself. A secret cabal of street-level cops and higher-ups inside the force had set me up, arrested me, nearly killed me, and then drummed me out of their ranks when my investigations threatened to expose their very lucrative peccadilloes. That said, I learned the trade of an investigative agent that allowed me to follow my own sense of right and wrong.

This hard-won expertise led me to the west side of Central Park, where it was most like the deep woods. There, behind many long-lived trees and upon the slope of a fabricated hill, was a walled-up cave that had been excavated when the park was built. Quite a few people knew about the cave’s existence, but park officials believed that it had been successfully blockaded by brick and mortar, soil and disguise.

I knew that there had been a new entrance to the apartment-size grotto excavated by a set of innovative young people who had need of a place to bring alcohol, weed, and the spillages of love.

Later, a man, or maybe a group of men calling themselves Slug, had taken over the hidden unit. Slug had created a shanty apartment, with a solid door, that he, or they, rented out, not unlike the late Mama Day had done with her co-op’s extra bedroom. The difference was that Slug most often rented this space to true criminals.

The park apartment had two things going for it. One was that it was within the district of a police precinct that tolerated its existence because they received a monthly fee and because they, now and again, were able to glean information that benefited law enforcement, such as it is. The second positive factor was that there was always someone residing in the underground unit. Slug, if there was such a person, or one of Slug’s employees, made it so that the unit was never disturbed. On top of that they were very particular about their tenants. There were strict protocols against any visitors, and when and from what approach one could enter or exit the unit.

I know all this because of my professional frenemy, Gladstone Palmer, dispatch sergeant extraordinaire, who kept tabs on all legal and not-legal police activities. Gladstone had told me how to deal with that particular piece of real estate.

I couldn’t try to breach the apartment because, even if it was inhabited only by some professional guardian, I would incur the wrath of the controllers. And if there was somebody else in there, they were probably doing something or hiding from something dangerous and desperate, and they’d be armed and ready for any assault. So, as a rule, the few times I needed to see who was staying there, I’d wait, sitting up on a hill, looking for signs of life, while watching, safely hidden by elder trees.

The foliage around the place where the grotto was secreted looked to have been disturbed. This fact told me that someone might very well have been down there. As a rule, women didn’t go there alone, but gender is never the deciding factor when life and death or the promise of money is on the menu, so I decided to wait and see if anything happened.

One might wonder what a man would be doing sitting in the woods, watching a stand of bushes, the soil of which might have been disturbed by a few footsteps, when there were dire circumstances elsewhere to be resolved. It’s a valid question. The answer is that I needed that time to think. There was a killer out there who might very well have wanted to hurt and torture the woman I was supposed to find. I didn’t know who the predator was or why they’d want to commit such a terrible crime. I figured that the object of my searches—Tina Marie, Twyla Macintosh, or maybe Twyla Mann—was the most likely person to know the lay of that foreign land. Maybe it was some fanatic who’d finally broken his tether, or, more likely, a thief who had been robbed.

Another thing I had learned during my tenure as a cop was that criminals bestowed upon the property they’d stolen the highest degree of ownership. What they usurped often meant more to them than it had to the original owners. This truth led me to understand the corporate mind. That particular legal and organized system of theft brought the notion of ownership to a violent buildup that often ended in war.

But I didn’t think that Twyla’s boyfriend had been tortured and killed because of some boardroom edict. He was tormented, and later slaughtered, out of a desire for vengeance or the fear of same. Neither did I think that my investigation was the cause of the young man’s pain and demise. I hadn’t been looking long enough to have stirred up that kind of criminality.

I wasn’t making reports to my employer and so he probably wasn’t connected to the killers. There was the man in black, Kenneth Rouche, who had braced me at my hotel. He had claimed to be working for Paulie Antonucci Jr., the son of my client’s dead partner, Paulie Antonucci Sr. Blass and Twyla had gone to Paulie Jr.’s place of business, but I had no idea what they wanted to discuss with him or if they had ever gotten to have that discussion.

It didn’t seem like Aurilia Fox, aka Dalia Shorts, was aware of the young man’s death, and she probably wouldn’t want her daughter dead. Aurilia had sent me to Co-op City and had not asked that I keep her updated as to the progress of my investigation.

Mara Macintosh was in a rest home.

At one point during that very long vigil, I started thinking that I should have killed Melton “Malto” Lamming. If I could have gone back to the time I witnessed the depravity in his third-floor room, I’m pretty sure I would have relieved him of the labor of breath, then called my cousin to help dispose of the body. That man had most probably destroyed dozens of lives. He drugged and raped and had the police in his pocket. Like Stalin’s head of the secret police, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, he would rape any woman who caught his fancy and, maybe also like his Russian counterpart, he’d offer the victim some flowers and then kill her if she refused to take them.

It was a mistake to consider Lamming. More and more this sidetrack of thought called up rage and revenge, the opposite of what I needed. He had ordered the death of the jazz singer, Dalia Shorts. He had also drugged the young Greta Hammett with the intention of violating her. But it seemed unlikely that he’d come after Randolph David Blass. The connections were just too tenuous.

These thoughts swirled around and around in my head. I was missing something, I knew that much. But that something had not been dislodged from whatever hiding place it occupied.

When twilight began to settle over my hardly peaceful state of mind, I decided that it was time to either investigate the cave or leave. I had come to this decision five or six times already, but each time I stayed in my hiding place, thinking and biding.

Then there was movement in the bushes that were set there to hide the cave’s entrance.

A woman came out through the boughs. She was wrapped in a scanty minidress and pumps. Her hair was done up. Rather than exiting a roughhewn, soil-encrusted cave, she looked like some party girl climbing out of a taxi on the Upper West Side.

The youngish Black woman made her way through the underbrush and down the slant of the hill with adroit skill. When she made it to the pathway, I roused and followed at a fair distance.

She was walking west down Seventy-Ninth Street, moving with intention but at a leisurely pace.